


Djalia

by Tiritiri_Matangi



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ancestral Plane, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 23:10:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15568434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiritiri_Matangi/pseuds/Tiritiri_Matangi
Summary: A meeting of equals in the ancestral plane.





	Djalia

There was no wind.

That was how M’Baku knew when he crossed. A true mountain forest was never quiet; there was always a breeze shaking branches together or a murmur of air in the distance or, on the quietest days, in the paused charged air before a thunderstorm, still the tiny rustles of leaves falling from their branches. He’d never seen a leaf fall, here. There were leaves on the branches and leaves that crunched underneath his boots, but never anything in-between. There was night-birdsong and the distant pacing of an animal through undergrowth, but he never saw the creatures that made those noises. Once he had been afraid of this place, but he was far from that young man, and something in his chest loosened, able to breathe again.

M’baku was tired enough to stumble as he walked, every part of him having long since given up protesting and settled into a dull, weary complaint that barely even mattered anymore, but the Ancestral Plane could hold no dangers for the chosen of Hanuman. He could not rest yet. Duty demanded nothing; his Primes he had sent away, his council was even now, those of them who hadn’t fought, convening to mop up the blood and gore. He could go home, strip off the armour caked in the sloppy, cloying stuff the aliens bled, and find his bed. And he would spend his hours staring at the ceiling, trying to find reasons behind the nonsensical loss. He had seen Jabari die. He had seen many cut down, and maybe they lived, and maybe they didn’t, or maybe they’d lived only long enough to dissolve like dust, like Wakandans and Jabari and aliens alike, without mercy or sense. There was so little sense in it. He’d held a Prime, bleeding out from a gut wound, and the woman helping bandage the wound had cracked into little pieces. Then, in the end, his Prime had died too.

He could not face the living. He could not face the dead either. M’Baku turned away from the pull inwards, to where the trees towered too high for light to reach the ground, to where the people he’d sent into war would be waiting for him. Comforting the dead was duty for another day, for ceremony and prayer, for a time when his mind felt less like it was going to fracture and leak out of his skull. He could not face that now. He would not be able to bear it. So he shied away from the deep gloom. He kept an eye on the height of the trees, on the absence of wind, and clambered forward, because to stop was… not good. 

The trees thinned, and changed, mutating from forest to savannah species, more of a patchy woodland. There were far less leaves under his boots, and grass began to appear in clumps. In the gaps between trunks, something bright glimmered, making his heartbeat ratchet back up again. Nothing could hurt him in this plane. Nothing.

He didn’t know what the lights were.

M’Baku stopped. The lights didn’t, dancing, casting shifting shadows over him and the forest behind him, but not in any order. There was no direction to the glimmering, nothing mechanical, and the organic-ness of it was what gave him the courage to approach, his knobkerrie held out in front of him.

Fireflies. Fireflies, he realised as soon as he had a clear view. The woodland melted away, and a sea of grass began, and on top of it, dancing random and twitching, were fireflies. Enough to cast light to rival the multi-coloured, spectral sky, all moving and twirling around each other, as through the auroras above were casting a distorted reflection. M’Baku watched them, wary, but they all swirled above the grass. None came under the shadows of the woodland, some sort of clear, spiritual… something happening.

He didn’t need this. It was unknown and inexplicable and M’Baku really should’ve tried going to bed instead of wandering into realms beyond human comprehension. He took one step back, then another, not quite willing to take his eyes off the light swarm, his grip on his knobkerrie strong. Something wasn’t right. There was some instinct going off, something he’d react to if he had more energy, if his thoughts weren’t impossible to catch and pull together. The fireflies swarmed and swirled and danced, but there wasn’t any wind tugging as the grass. There shouldn’t have been wind anyway, just like in the forest, but – he could hear rustling, M’Baku realised. Rustling in the woodland.

He couldn’t- he couldn’t see what was happening, couldn’t track whatever was moving the leaves, and surely it was an animal, surely, but instinct told him no. The dancing lights flashed shadows all around him, shifting black and bright and back to black again, and he couldn’t see. M’Baku, acting on a niggle in the back of his mind and whatever caution he was capable of, hooked his foot into the fork of a stupid weird woodland tree and hauled himself up, gaining as much height as he could before the branches turned thin and spindly.

The rustling came closer, and he was still convinced it wasn’t just another animal he’d never see, convinced by something he brain wouldn’t tell him. He tried to focus on the noise, to figured out what was different about it. It was rhythmic, a fairly steady one-two beat of the crunch of leaves underneath something. And that was odd, for some reason.

He got it, just as a figure swung into view in all the dancing shadows. The gait of a human was markedly different to an animal.

White, was his first impression. An almost blinding white, like the man was glowing underneath the patterns of light that hit him, and then he turned his face and the light caught on his jaw and, of course, of course it had to be T’Challa. The dead king wandering, and M’Baku had to catch him at it, had to have decided to come to Djalia just after Wakanda had been decapitated. He shook, and the tree shook with him, and there was no way he was getting out unscathed, so he dropped, thudding to the ground.

“Yho!” T’Challa shrieked, and spun and flinched in a movement both faintly impossible and unnaturally graceful.

Standing up, covered in gore and exhaustion, M’Baku could not measure up to the ghost. “Sorry.”

T’Challa sputtered, starting and abandoning words, progressing through shock to confusion to, finally, “…M’Baku?”

“Aye.” He sighed.

“Oh.” T’Challa lurched forward, hands coming up, ignoring the knobkerrie M’Baku held to frame M’Baku’s face in his clasp, warm and dry. “Oh. M’Baku I’m so sorry.”

“Shut up.” He growled, before he could think not to, the spike of guilt too sudden to be adjusted for. Of course T’Challa would apologise for being dead. “We’ll live.”

T’Challa snorted, and M’Baku realised what he’d just said, jolted into a dry laugh because _no_ they both wouldn’t.

Dry thumbs stroked over his skin, M’Baku’s dead king tremendously, unnervingly close, digging his thumbs into the dip in his skull behind his eyes. M’Baku was supposed to offer comfort to spirits, not the other way around, but T’Challa’s eyes were uncomfortably sincere, and it was hard to meet them. “What happened to you?” T’Challa asked, hesitantly, quietly, like he too realised that the main noises in this place came from their breathing.

“A lot of fucking aliens.” He admitted. M’baku didn’t want to know what had happened to T’Challa. Okoye’s grief was enough. But he should ask. “Did it hurt?”

“No,” M’Baku didn’t know if he trusted that turn to T’Challa mouth, like a smile but without happiness. “No, it didn’t. Sorry”

“Stop doing that.” He was still holding the knobkerrie between them, defensive and guarded while T’Challa just reached across, as though touching each other had ever been a thing that was common between them. “You think I’d take pleasure in your pain?”

T’Challa shrugged. “It might be apt.”

“’ _It might be apt_ ’” M’Baku mimicked, finally forcing enough calm to lower his weapon. “What does that even- Shit. Sorry.”

“What?”

“I’ve got alien shit on your clothes.” He sighed, and there was something very poetic about sullying that white.

“No matter.” T’Challa dismissed it, but they both looked down at the smudge M’Baku’s knobkerrie had left when he moved it, the literal caking of gore on the wood underneath his fingers. “…There is a stream, close to here?”

Every version of T’Challa was so damn amicable, even the dead one. “Lead the way.”

It was much easier, when he had T’Challa in front of him, in sight and clearly making the rustling with each step. The woodland was still being thrown into sharp relief, a different light show each second, but it felt easier. It probably wasn’t supposed to, but he was fast approaching the point of not caring.

T’Challa led him through the twilight of the blazing sky and night ground, looking back often, as though M’Baku was going to vanish if left alone. They walked on patterned, dappled ground until T’Challa stopped, gestured out of the woodland and across a not-endless expanse of grass, to where a stream burst out onto the grassland from more woodland. “Over there.”

There were more fireflies, on this grass. How there were so many, M’Baku didn’t know, but they still made him uneasy. “I’m not going out there.”

T’Challa shifted. “The woods,” he gestured, showing how they nearly encircled the grass here, making more of a large clearing than a part of the savannah. “We could go around?”

M’Baku ducked away in that direction, instead of replying.

He did not know why the dead king was so easily persuaded to skirt around the fireflies. As it was, he did not care. The almost clearing was small enough for the walk around it to not be so long, but instead of taking him to where the water met the grassland, T’Challa ducked further inward. Curious, perhaps morbidly so, M’Baku followed without question. At the foot of a dubiously natural looking pile of boulders, two or three men tall and just as wide, the stream hit rock and gave up on moving forward for a while, forming a pool that did not look to be deep enough to swim in. T’Challa turned back to him, again, the curve of his outstretched hand forming a question.

One should be cautious of spirits luring him to water, but M’Baku was past that with this king. He padded forward instead, his boots sinking into the ground around the pool, first dust, then soil with fresh, new grass, then clear flowing depths. He waded into the clean waters and found himself glad for the half-light of Djalia concealing the blood and dirt floating off him. Whatever aliens bled, they did so with black oil and half strung muscle. Just looking at the filth coming off him, the tiny glimpse of Jabari wood still holding strong, still protecting him underneath all the grime, roused energy enough to scrub at his bracers, his chest plate, the fur construct against his skin that should have been grey. He used his nails to scratch at the congealed gore on his ribs, to tear it off him, and he no longer cared that this was spirit water in a holy place, he wanted to be _clean_.

He hardly registered T’Challa taking his other arm until he tried to move it and found it captured by a calm immovable object. “Your clothes,” M’baku grunted. He didn’t have the will to protest more than that. T’Challa ignored him completely, which felt more normal than anything else in days. He turned M’Baku’s hand over, fingers working at the clasps of the bracer until M’baku gave in and let him have it, releasing it with a thought. T’Challa dipped it underwater and dug his fingers into it, the wood and the construct fur underneath, working the gore out of it.

He stood there, waist deep in the cool water that was unnaturally the perfect temperature, just like the night air was unnaturally neither hot or cold, and he let T’Challa take the other bracer, scrubbed at his own arms to try and get at the skin, to see if he was still brown under all of the shit on him or whether he’d turned grey and cracked like the vanished dead, as though the only thing still keeping him alive was the absolute coating of other being’s insides on him. A long, clumpy mess of internal organs had dried and set and took the hair on his forearm with it when he ripped it off, making him curse, making it easy to lose track of T’Challa until he felt something picking at his back, searching for joints, and fine. He released his chest plate too, let the man behind him pull it over his head. At some point his bracers had been put on the muddy slush that passed for a bank of the pool, lying in the pool-fed green grass with fur that was not back to being grey, yet, but was closer to it.

He sat down in the shallow water before it turned into bank, blindly reaching to take off his boots. The slowly moving water teased the soles of his feet, cool and soft as he wriggled his toes inanely. M’Baku hesitated, but T’Challa, standing just over waist deep in the deepest part of the pool and glaring as he tried to pick brown shards out of the poor furs that normally stood on M’Baku’s shoulders, black snippets of scales or skin stuck to his blindingly white sleeves, brown stains spreading where he had M’Baku’s armour braced against his chest, T’Challa was not looking. So he took off his lower tunic too, the leather there just as disgusting as the rest of him. Digging his hands into the murk he sat in, he slathered palmfuls of the mud on himself, his arms, his chest, as much of his back as he could reach with muscles sore and protesting, his face and hair. In the hot springs of Jabariland supposedly the mud rejuvenated the skin, but all M’baku needed was enough soft grit to loosen the caked-on gore. He scrubbed as his arms, trying to see if it was working, and after multiple attempts, with what little he could properly see under the weird lighting of the world he visited, he thought they were back to their normal colour. He could see the normal outline of his bicep again, instead of a strange profile of clumps and bumps. And no wonder T’Challa had startled, if this was what he looked like. Fortunately, his legs had been underwater for long enough that most of the filth fell off him easily, which left him just worrying about his upper half. He started a pattern of putting on mud, scrubbing at it, and then ducking down or rolling around in the water to get it and the gore off. Rinse, literally, and repeat.

And if it was inelegant, it was also effective. He could feel the night air on newly exposed skin, the way his hair went from one large congealed mass to smaller clumps, closer and closer to being hair instead of just gore stuck to his head.

“M'Baku?”

“Hmm?” He twisted around.

T’Challa looked at him like he was mad, although it was a very T’Challa-ish sort of disapproval, with an expression and outreached hands that implied that if M’Baku was mad, T’Challa would be the one transporting him to a therapy group. M’Baku shook his head, trying to get his thoughts to work right. “You’re covered in mud.” T’Challa said.

“Rather that than alien.” He scooped up another handful to smear it on the back of his neck. “Gets it off.”

“Oh.” T’Challa looked down at the waterlogged chest piece he held. “I can see why that might be useful.”

He huffed something approximating a laugh. “I don’t want to know what those things were made of.”

“I must admit to a similar lack of curiosity.” The king agreed easily and waded toward him.

M’Baku glanced at him out of the corner of his eyes, watching him cautiously, but T’Challa was just there for the same mud as he was, slathering it onto M’baku’s armour without further conversation, mirroring the way M’Baku scrubbed at his own back. Odd to see T’Challa doing something so simple as scouring armour. He knew the man didn’t cultivate dignity, that it just sort of _happened_ around him, the way it normally did for those with far more age and experience, but T’Challa _was_ dignified, and usually people didn’t just shed that like a cloak. He really needed to stop watching.

The problem solved itself when T’Challa drifted behind him, a gentle thunk as he put M’Baku armour down on the bank. The water swirled around him, noise still tracking T’Challa’s movements, but even though he knew T’Challa was close he still flinched when a warm hand leant against the small of his back. “Alright?” T’Challa murmured.

“Fine.” He muttered, and stopped trying to grope behind himself.

Wet cloth hit his hip as T’Challa sat down behind him, water dripping before mud hit his back. As wired and tired as he was, he couldn’t help the tremble when he was touched out of where he could see, when he couldn’t track T’Challa’s hands, but he ignored it, turning his attention to his face, rubbing sandy grit trough his beard and on his forehead and almost up his nose, trying to stop smelling what was on him. His was filthy enough to pick of an actual lump of something, from underneath his jaw. He splashed palmfuls of water on his face, and the heat behind him squawked, and oh yes. T’Challa. Right. “Sorry.”

“I thought you were worried about my clothes.” But he dug in his fingers, anyway, prising off sweat and blood with blunt panther claws.

“You seem intent on ruining them.”

“And for such sins I deserve river water to my face?”

“River water is the least worst liquid in that mix.” He admitted. “I have alien in my beard.”

“Ugh.” Fingers left his back and came up to rest on the corner of his jawline, picking something off him so T’Challa could see for himself. “How in Bast’s name…”

“Hanuman’s name.” He grunted. “Parts of the aliens would burst. Some parts. Not others. I don’t know.”

T’Challa’s other hand scratched at his back. “This won’t come off.”

He couldn’t feel anything still on him. “What?”

“There is this… silvery thing. On your skin.”

Abruptly, M’Baku realised that T’Challa and the other lowlanders wouldn’t expect it on him. The only other time T’Challa have been this close, he’d been covered in white powder and fighting him. He didn’t want to have to explain it. “That’s normal.”

“Does it… hurt?”

He laughed. “No.” He was a silverback. He was chosen of Hanuman. Such duty was no injury.

T’Challa accepted that, because in another moment, his muddy hands were tangling themselves at the back of M’Baku’s head, teasing scales out of his hair. M’Baku returned to washing his face, careful to not throw water over his shoulder. When he twisted too much T’Challa caught him by fingers tangled in his hair, cupping his head and turning it for his own ease, and M’Baku still couldn’t see him but apparently that was no barrier to taking his mind away from T’Challa anymore, not that it could be with the man so _close_.

“I think that’s the worst of it.” T’Challa prodded at him, gently using his hold to nudge M’Baku into tipping onto his side to put his face down. When M’Baku stopped short of the water and pooled it in his hands to tip it over his face, T’Challa nudged him again. He let himself be tipped underwater, felt the hand in his hair release its grip so that it could massage at his hair, let a kind tug bring him up back into air with his head cradled as he got his knees under himself and was pulled back, kneeling with company along his back. “There you are.” T’Challa tipped his head back, again with a hold on M’Baku’s hair to turn him about. “I wondered if you would ever look clean again. Back to normal.”

How T’Challa could see anything of what he looked like from being half plastered along M’Baku’s arse was a mystery. “Better then you, now.” He stared at the sky, off balanced.

He huffed, his breath raising the hairs on M’Baku’s back. “There is life in you yet.”

“So _dignified_.” M’Baku said, trying to ignore everything, his nakedness, the king’s hand in his hair, the warmth behind him. “I don’t actually know what you’d do, without a fucking diplomatic script.”

T’Challa laughed, low and intimate, and the rumble travelled through him like thunder. “I think I’d be fine.”

“Could probably still talk yourself out of anything.” M’Baku admitted, and T’Challa wasn’t moving, and he needed T’Challa to let him go before his body reacted the way it wanted to a deadly, pretty man pressed up behind him. “You need to get off me, I feel like I’m going to be fucked.” He winced.

T’Challa paused, half way through an aborted attempt to extract himself. “…A lot of life, apparently.” Instead of removing himself and giving M’Baku back his head he made a soft, considering noise, and settled right back in. “…I didn’t know you liked men.”

“It’s not something I’d bring up at Council.” He snapped, trying to restart his heart, leaning away only for T’Challa’s hold to sway him back. “You’ve never asked.” He very much needed to ask what the hell was happening.

“M’Baku, do you like men?” T’Challa said, completely gentle and clearly hunting. He leant forward, and the front of his robe was rough against the skin of M’baku’s back.

He huffed, and tried to make words happen.

Heat against the nape of his neck, from breath, from the slide of scuff on his skin. “Do you like _this_ man?”

“Maybe.” He grunted, lost and reaching for solid ground. “Your personality could use some work.”

T’Challa muffled a laugh against his shoulder blade, and his grip tugged, and M’Baku let himself be turned, and then there were lips pressed to the curve of his jaw, dragging lightly across his skin.

“I didn’t know you like men, either.” He tried not to hiss, or pant, or pull in too much air.

“Really?”

“No?”

“Huh.” T’Challa hummed against his skin. “I forget that the Jabari have not been exposed to all the tabloid stories of my youth.”

“That’s, uh,” T’Challa’s lips dipped lower, pressed against the pulse in his neck, “what?”

With the hand not in his hair, T’Challa’s touch stroked down his ribs, light and electrifying. He stopped just about M’Baku’s hip, fingers tracing pattern so light they were almost ticklish, and T’Challa chuckled against his neck. “Have I finally found something that makes you less obstinate?”

“I’m too tired to argue.”

“Ah, well…” T’Challa’s hands paused, his lips leaving M’Baku’s skin.

“Not that tired.” M’Baku said.

“Are you sure?”

An honest question, that. He did not think it was a good idea, no, but he was sure of his desire of it. He leant into the heat at his back, tipped his head back to lie against the arch of muscle joining T’Challa’s neck and shoulder, and pressed his mouth to the shadowed skin there.

“Yes?” T’Challa asked, because apparently that wasn’t answer enough.

“Yes, you idiot.” He huffed. “Even though I’m covered in river water and alien blood.”

“At the risk of pointing out the obvious,” T’Challa took his hand from M’Baku’s head, waving the bloodied, limp, and soaked white sleeve in front of him. “I think you are cleaner than I am.”

That was an opportunity, if he was bold enough to take it. “So take them off.” He muttered into T’Challa’s neck, hovering somewhere between having the courage to suggest that but not having the courage to do anything about it.

T’Challa made a soft noise, and moved, ungainly with all the water-soaked fabric on him. “Could you back up a little?” He asked, and M’Baku shuffled backwards, inelegant on his knees, pool shallow enough that he was almost completely exposed and not remotely comfortable with it.  T’Challa reached out, nudging his ribcage with his knuckles, pushing him back further, and M’Baku went with it, let T’Challa keep doing it, but he felt awkward and unsteady about it. “A little more.” T’Challa prompted.

If someone had a plan, he’d like to be let in on it. “Where am I going?”

“Backwards.” T’Challa said, and leant in, kissing him in brief little presses that cut off M’Baku’s irritation and replaced it with blooming heat and a sort of vague, distant worry that appreciation of it might be sacrilegious.

“This is going to take a while.” He managed to point out.

“Ah. Probably.” T’Challa hummed, kissed him more firmly, then left him, standing up, looking down with kind, wide blown eyes and stepped out of the pool, hands working at the fastenings of his clothes. He split the white robe open and shrugged out of it with a shameless lack of modesty that M’baku was _not_ appreciating, bending down to lay the robe flat on the grass, the still clean, if wet inside exposed to the stars.

M’Baku didn’t see what T’Challa did, busy staring at his arse when he bent over, but apparently he missed something, because T’Challa came back with a long suffering sigh, tugging him up off his knees. M’Baku didn’t miss the brief flicker of surprise when T’Challa had to look _up_ at him. “Is it new?” He asked, innocently. “To be small?”

“I’m not small, you’re just _massive_.” T’Challa huffed, visibly recalculating.

T’Challa was obviously very much not used to that, then. But M’Baku had never had a partner he hadn’t had to duck to kiss, even if it was only slightly, even if he barely had to bend to get T’Challa to slot up against him, to kiss him heavy and slow. He felt T’Challa surge against him, pushing up, and he grinned against his king, pulled back little by little until T’Challa had to be standing on tip toe, teased him there happily until T’Challa figured out what he was doing and glared at him, something M’Baku couldn’t fully see this close. He snickered and T’Challa got his hands on either side of his head, tugging him around by his hair again, which was looking more and more like a _thing_ and not just a coincidence. Grumbling, T’Challa got his mouth around M’Baku’s lower lip and sucked, dug his teeth in until it stung and slowly, viciously dropped back down to stand normally, bringing M’Baku with him. “Brute,” M’Baku groaned, not sure if he was complaining.

T’Challa stepped back, smugly pressing his thumb to M’Baku’s lip. “Come on.”

He let himself be led to the robe and pushed down onto it, turning himself around to lie belly up, elbows underneath him, and stared at the view. T’Challa was all hard planes of skin and muscle, built for work and not to look good, the figure of a fighter, as M’Baku could vouch for. The unnatural sky lit him up and cast strange shadows, purple and blueish, but they not enough to stop M’Baku getting a good look at his cock. Under his gaze T’Challa dropped his shoulders, hand fidgeting on his thigh, and it was good to know he was not the only one feeling overexposed, even better when he actually caught the moment T’Challa got distracted, his eyes stuck just below M’Baku’s navel, posture still uncomfortable but expression openly appreciative. M’Baku stretched his toes out, hooked them behind T’Challa ankle and tugged. He didn’t feel much like being seen, not right then. He didn’t want the space to think.

T’Challa came where he was beckoned, crouching over him, and M’Baku hauled him up further, ignoring the surprised huff of air to get his mouth on what he was mildly sure was a tattoo of panther spots. “Cute.” He murmured, and bit it. T’Challa gasped and dropped, and suddenly there was considerably more weight and a hardening cock on him. “Pretty kitty,” M’baku cooed, wondering how far he could push it, and T’Challa managed to get a single syllable out before he dug his teeth in again, with much the same results. This, he decided, was glorious fun. He moved to another spot and scrapped his teeth over the skin, hard, wondering if it was possible to get a hickey to show up on a white spot, if it was worth trying.

“Are you just going to lie there and maul me?” T’Challa panted, fooling no one. “What are you-“

Fingers suddenly scrabbled at his head, and he let T’Challa’s skin go. T’Challa reared back on top of him, sitting solidly on M’Baku’s stomach and prodding at his collarbone with rapidly increasing alarm. “What’s wrong?” M’Baku asked.

“Why is this on me?” T’Challa pawed at his panther spots.

“What do you mean?” M’Baku sat up, which pushed T’Challa into his lap and T’Challa’s arse over his cock, but this was not the time. T’Challa was genuinely alarmed. “Isn’t it a tattoo?”

“No?!”

“Calm down.” He caught T’Challa’s hands. “Is it hurting you?”

“What? No.” He could see T’Challa force sense into himself. “No. I do not normally have this, though.”

“Are you sure?” Stupid question. “When we fought you had this.”

“When we- right, no. That was paint. Not a tattoo.”

“Sacred paint?”

“I am… unclear. On that.”

“I doubt it will hurt you.” He tried to reassure T’Challa.

T’Challa snorted. “You try having something just appear on your skin.”

Oh, he remembered. He smiled ruefully and bent down to kiss the top over where the marks stretched over T’Challa’s shoulders. “It has been on you since you took off the robe. It has not just appeared.”

“I… did not notice.”

“A compliment.”

“Maybe I have acquired it. Because of where we are.” T’Challa suggested, hesitantly, still poking at his own collarbone.

“Maybe.” He agreed, and did not add that it could have very well been a mark of death, setting apart T’Challa’s spirit from living members of Bast’s Golden Tribe. That should not have made him want T’Challa closer, but Hanuman damn him, T’Challa had been his brother in arms, the voice of leadership, his people’s hope for a better future with their cousins, his _friend_. And he- he did not want to think about that, right now. He pulled T’Challa down, buried what he did not say in a harsh kiss. T’Challa caught back up with the plan, and his hands left the strange marks to, once again, find their way to M’Baku’s head. He turned M’Baku how he wanted and opened him up, licking into M’Baku’s mouth and pressing M’Baku back to the ground. T’Challa took over, hot and distracting, and it was a bit too much to try to pull thoughts together. The man knew how to kiss, and was apparently perfectly happy to keep M’Baku there, pinned under the panther’s weight and slowly melting underneath him. He grunted and tried not to moan when T’Challa got his teeth into his lower lip again, worrying at it.

M’Baku trailed his hands over the back of T’Challa’s thighs, and T’Challa twitched over him with a stuttered breath, bringing their cocks together, and if the look before had told him T’Challa’s cock was pretty, what he felt now told him it was hard, hot and wanting. He tried the back of T’Challa’s thighs again, stroking the skin there, and T’Challa hummed against his mouth. M’Baku curled his nails in and got a gasp, his name hissed as T’Challa tipped his head up, and panthers should know better than to expose their throats, because it was too fucking tempting to not bury his face there and nip. He scratched his way up T’Challa’s thighs until he could grope his ass, delighting in the tiny circles T’Challa’s shifting drew on his belly, licking the salt from his neck.

“M’Baku,” T’Challa whispered, tiny, quiet noises choked down. He tried to tug M’Baku about, but his hair wasn’t long enough for T’Challa’s grip to make more than a strong suggestion, and he was perfectly happy where he was. He grinned against T’Challa neck and reached between them both to palm his cock. T’Challa shivered, his breath stuttering when M’Baku closed his hand around him, and when M’Baku gripped his ass he made a low, soft noise, hips rolling forward.

M’Baku could find very little to care about that was not T’Challa’s throat between his teeth, T’Challa’s head bowed over him, his guttural, half-silenced groan when M’Baku stroked him. T’Challa shifting to prop himself up, to give M’Baku more room. He panted into M’Baku’s cheek, tugged and tugged until M’Baku let him kiss him again, heavy and distracted, his hand fumbling down until he found M’Baku’s cock to tug on instead.  M’Baku thumbed the head of his cock and he gasped, grip going slack, and M’Baku ground his hips up with a grunt, chasing pleasure. T’Challa came back down to him, mouth, hand, and cock all pressing him down, and shifted to bring them together, taking them both in the loose circle of his hand. Their cocks dragged together when he rolled his hips, and M’Baku was pinned without the leverage to do the same. He pulled T’Challa close, chasing his quiet noises, licking into his mouth, and T’Challa came like that, muffled and soft, shivering on top of his chest.

M’baku kissed his slack mouth, savouring the tiny twitches as T’Challa lost himself to the heady rush, the hot press of their bodies together. T’Challa swayed over him, just slightly, and M’Baku caught him with a hand under his arm, steadied him and felt the heartbeat that pounded underneath his skin. T’Challa grunted, collapsed on him a little and framed M’Baku’s face with his hands, which was ironic. “I thought you were trying to get me clean.” He murmured.

T’Challa made a low, questioning noise, panting.

He pried one of T’Challa’s hands off his face and kissed it, trailed his tongue over T’Challa’s fingers and the bitterness there. T’Challa was not back to his usual sharpness, still blissfully soft around the edges, and he stared, completely entranced and utterly not getting it, until M’Baku tilted his head up and shared the taste of him. “Oh. _Oh._ I did not- I am sorry,” he said.  M’Baku smirked, caught one of T’Challa’s fingers between his teeth, and licked the rest of his come off it. He hollowed his cheeks and sucked, flicking his tongue against the pad of T’Challa’s finger, and T’Challa’s apology dissolved into a gasp, a low, shocked moan. “ _Bast’s sake_ , M’Baku.”

“Hanuman’s sake,” he grumped.

“Whatever.” T’Challa wiped his hand off on the robe underneath them. “Be quiet.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he smirked, and T’Challa bent to kiss it off him. He lost himself in T’Challa’s mouth for a while, in the slick push and pull between them, but T’Challa shifted over his hips and he jerked, helpless with it.

It was T’Challa’s turn to look smug, dropping to twist and grind against him while he twitched, without leverage or control. “Might there be _something_ you’d _like_ me to _do?”_ He purred, punctuating his words with the filthy roll of his hips.

“Anything,” he moaned, the sound punched out of his chest by the damnable creature on top of him. He tried to clutch T’Challa to him, but the panther was uncooperative, so he dropped his head back, groaning in disappointment when T’Challa lifted his weight off him. “Something, come on.”

“Patience,” T’Challa murmured, kissing down his throat.

“Consider _my entire personality_.” He said unevenly, petulantly trying to push T’Challa lower.

T’Challa stopped, hovering over his stomach, pressing a sharp, biting kiss to the bottom of his ribs. “I’ve thought of something that will make you laugh.”

“What?”

“May I correct an earlier statement you made?”

“What?” He repeated and tried to shove T’Challa down again.

He just grinned into M’baku’s belly. “I don’t need to get off you, I need to get you off.”

M’Baku broke down into cackling laughter, shaking with it, head thrown back so he didn’t see anything to give him warning of the stripe of wet heat that worked up his cock, and he choked on his laughter, an undignified shocked whine. Between his legs, T’Challa chuckled.

“That was terrible!”

“M’Baku, I’ve known you for two years. You do have a terrible sense of humour.”

“I’d argue that-“ T’Challa pressed his mouth to the base of his cock, “-or I could not.”

“Miraculous.” T’Challa laughed, and then his tongue was on him, clumsy and perfect, and M’baku would allow him his good humour if he’d just keep doing that. He took M’Baku into his mouth, hand around the base of his cock, and M’Baku squirmed, control rapidly evaporating with the sweeping heat of T’Challa’s mouth, each bob of his head and flicker of his tongue. T’Challa worked his way down, and under the soft constricting heat M’Baku broke, his hips jerking up as T’Challa flinched backwards before he could choke. “Rude.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he panted, but he couldn’t stop shifting, body desperately trying to get T’Challa back.

T’Challa pinned him down, arms shoving his hips flat. “Are you going to behave?”

“Probably not.” He admitted, close enough to helplessly twitch with it.

He nuzzled at the base of M’baku’s cock, eyes flicking up to watch him. “You’d better.”

“T’Challa, _please,_ for the love of your god or mine, come on!”

T’Challa smiled, slow and pleased, and swallowed his cock. MBaku clamped a hand over his mouth, bit the meat of his palm to muffle himself as T’Challa pulled off, slowly, tongue dragging against him, sucked in a deep breath, and took him nearly to the hilt, smugly humming around him as M’Baku swore and tried to buck, his grip bruisingly hard where he held M’Baku down. He couldn’t last, not hard and aching and desperate, and he pawed at T’Challa’s shoulders, tried to gasp a warning.  T’Challa sunk down again, lips and suction and heat, and he lost himself, coming hard and sharp, breathless and lost and whining stupidly as T’Challa’s tongue worked him through the aftershocks.

He shook and trembled and reached out blindly, until there was a hand in his to clutch. T’Challa pressed kisses into his belly as he came back to himself. Grabbing with his other hand, he failed to haul T’Challa up, pleasure weak and useless in the aftermath. “Come here.”

T’Challa placed a kiss on his collarbone as he crawled up. He paused, hesitating, but M’Baku didn’t really care about the taste, and he wanted to be kissed. Cupping the back of his neck, he tugged T’Challa down, sinking beneath him into bliss as T’Challa took over, firm and easy until someone attacked his lower lip again. “Ow.” He mumbled, and T’Challa murmured an apology, gentled his kisses as M’Baku’s heartbeat settled and lethargy crept back into his bones.

He absolutely could not fall asleep. If he did, nothing would wake him, not after entire days spent awake and fighting. But it was so easy to lie there and steal a few more moments of slow kisses and gentle touches, to take just another second, until he realised he was having trouble keeping his eyes open, that the danger of just falling unconscious was real. He couldn’t. Not there not where no one could reach him when the next inevitable aftershock of the invasion hit his tribe. He couldn’t.

M’Baku sat up with a grunt, T’Challa lifting himself up to let him move and then resettling in his lap, already drawing back. M’Baku dipped forward to get one more kiss, but that was not conductive to going anywhere, and it was several more minutes before he gave in to the inevitable. “I need to go rest.”

“Mmm. I think you do.” T’Challa thumbed the hollow below his eye. There was already something distant in the gesture, something sad, the king withdrawing to his diplomatic script. “I shouldn’t have kept you from it.”

M’Baku shook his head, and buried it in T’Challa’s chest, breathing him in.

It could not last. “Time to go,” T’Challa sighed, and unfolded himself.

M’Baku followed, his body making great protests at being expected to move. T’Challa handed him his damp clothing, and he reassembled it around himself, the return of his furs a deep set and powerful comfort. His knobkerrie he returned to his back, finally convinced that he needed no weapon in his hands. He finished strapping his arm bracers on and stopped, hesitating.

And then T’Challa was there, fussing with the fur over his shoulders. He bent, just a little, just enough to put his lips to T’Challa’s forehead, and T’Challa’s fussing hands froze. For a second, he leant against M’Baku. Then he stepped backwards. “Time to go.”

M’Baku nodded. He took one last look, then turned his back.

It took no time at all to cross from woodland to forest, unnaturally so. He walked, breathed, and around him the forest started to come to life, the skittering of insects, first a breath of air, then a breeze, then the distant calls of a troop of monkeys settled in the treetops, the Ancestral Plane gone from him like a fallen robe. He walked, uneven and operating mostly on autopilot, until he found a trail and the trail turned into a track and the track turned into a tunnel, until the smooth circle of wood at the end rushed him upwards with the slightest of pushes that sent him to his knees. Spat out into his halls at the top, he found his feet for long enough to make it to his rooms, shedding the knobkerrie and little else before finally, at last, collapsing into his bed.

Hands pulled him from his sleep, forcing him upright before they managed to force him awake, the world tumbling into noise and a crowd around him. M’Baku blinked back into something ressembling consciousness, hit with noise and people around him. “What?!” All five people started talking at once. He barked, overwhelmed and half asleep. The maelstrom ceased. “What is it?”

One of his brothers, one of his sisters, two of his less injured, non-sibling Primes, and a woman he vaguely recognised as an administrative assistant. The last was the one to speak, stuttering nervously, almost out of place with how clean she was, compared to the half-blackened with alien bodies of the four fighters. “Great Gorilla, you have – there’s a ship, it summons you to the Golden City.”

“They cannot be given their foreign fighters back yet.” It took him a second to recognise Amobi. His brother had half his face swathed in bandages. “All need rest. Some are not yet stable enough to be moved.”

“You, us, we all need rest too,” K’Lass shrugged, his sister remarkably unharmed and basically unwashed, her words slow enough that she might not yet have been able to sleep at all.

“But the world turns ever onwards.” He nodded, shoved down his belligerent irritation, and gave up on the idea of sleep. He was needed.

Getting to the Wakandan ship was a blur of passage through the inner tunnels, of trying to force himself to be quick and force his mind to restart all at the same time. The pilot of the ship was abnormally young, unsteady to be in Jabariland and quick to take them away. The aircraft took off with its characteristic lack of sound, M’Baku collapsed in a corner. The first question was why the Wakandans wanted him there, what purpose he could serve. Without T’Challa, with the royal family busy, surely he barely had any allies there. So they wanted him for their own ends, and this would not be a visit to make sure his tribe was alright, to lend support of some form. No one would think of that in a time of crisis.

It was probably to crown Shuri, which hurt to think about. They probably wanted his guarantee he would not challenge this time, that the Jabari would fall in behind her. There would be no better time – he could not fight in his condition. It made sense, but fuck if he didn’t care. He wanted to go home, he wanted to get out of this horrible flying machine, and if all they were calling him for was political bullshit then they could go fuck themselves, but it might not be, it might be worse. Aliens, Europeans, invasion of one kind or both. He could not be sure. So he had to go.

The sun was rising above Birnin Zana, which he did not care about, and the pilot brought them in for a smooth landing, which very much did still concern him, even after two years of being shuttled in for Tribal Council meetings. The pilot opened the door for him with a bow that showed her youth and naivety. M’Baku wondered what dead Wakandan she was replacing. His feet took the path to the throne room by rote, a bizarre and unfortunately well-worn path of twists and turns into the core complex. He rounded the last corner and stopped. Stared.

T’Challa.

It was impossible, but _T’Challa_.

T’Challa was there. T’Challa was there, standing next to Okoye, saying something in words M’Baku could not hear over the rabbiting of his heart, the shaking of his bones. M’Baku grabbed the wall, seeking something solid as the world changed under him, an impossible, unbearable trickery, but T’Challa did not vanish between one blink and the next. He shuddered, and T’Challa turned to look at him, and he had a moment of deep, paradoxical understanding as the same blank shock swept over T’Challa, his jaw dropping, his shoulders gone rigid.

He was actually, irrevocably, fundamentally _fucked_ , and not, he thought hysterically, in the fun way.

Either he’d dipped into insanity and his mind had made an unacceptable mirage, or T’Challa was alive, and he was going to sort out the contrary tangle of emotions he felt at that _later_ , in a place that was _not there_. T’Challa was dead, taken from them. Okoye had said so, had said she had failed, that he was dust with all the rest, and M’Baku turned his back and fled away from the unbearably public impossibility.

Mere moments away from the throne room, he was yanked into a side corridor, hauled through a doorway with unthinking force that ruled against a hallucination. M’Baku had the briefest of seconds to take in the morning sun streaming through the glass and the steps leading down to it before he rounded on the evidence that could not be true. As T’Challa’s palm hit the door and a lock thunked into place M’Baku shoved him against the wall, pinning him there to search his blank face. “What the fuck. What the FUCK T’Challa aren’t you _dead?_ ”

“I… you are not?” T’Challa’s fingers hit the front of his chest plate, and M’Baku flinched backwards, etting go of him. “M’Baku, you were not killed?”

“ _What_?” He didn’t understand. “No! You were!”

“ _Why_ were you in Djalia-“

 A mishmash of every warning tale his elders had taught him ran like quicksilver though his head, and he thought of a possibility far worse than a living king. He had no idea how the Wakandans moved in or out of Djalia, but if T’Challa’s spirit had forced its way out, “the dead cannot play puppet life for long,” he gasped, horrified, “T’Challa, if you left Djalia you must return, you will break apart here-“

“Spirits can- You think I did that?”

“You will not survive it-“

“No! No, M’Baku _shut up._ ” T’Challa levered himself off the wall. “I am not dead. I _was_ and now I _am not._ ”

“That is not possible.” M’baku reared up, trying to get as much height to glare down T’Challa as he could.

“Aliens are not possible!” He sounded untethered. “ _Magic_ is not possible!”

“You were _dust_ -“

“HALF THE UNIVERSE WAS DUST.” T’Challa snarled, vibrating with overwhelmed desperation. “THERE ARE MEN AND MONSTERS AND ALIENS AND WE WERE ALL DEAD TOGETHER. AND WE, and then we were… we were _brought back_ , I do not… I do not understand.” He went from a roar to a whimpered, the energy draining out from him along with the flood of words. “I was dead, but I was not in that Ancestral Plane. Barred from Djalia. And I, when we were brought back, _after_ , after the leader was killed, I was… I did not know if I could. Be in Djalia. So I… tried. And you were… I thought you died.”

He didn’t understand. M’baku did not understand, but T’Challa did not look like a spirit, insubstantial and magical. He looked like M’baku felt, at the end of his stamina, undefeated but worn down into a stump of himself. So, maybe, T’Challa wasn’t dead.

So maybe they’d fucked each other, each thinking the other had died.

It was absurd, and he snorted, breaking down into hysterical, shaking laughter. Pawing at his back for his absent knobkerrie to prop himself up, he nearly overbalanced.

“…M’Baku?”

“You thought I died,” he gasped, trying to control the giggling, “I thought you died.”

“What, would you rather one of us actually had?”

“Yes? No? Maybe?” He gave up and collapsed onto one of the steps leading down to the window. “It would be I hadn’t slept with the King of Wakanda?” Watching the blood drain from T’Challa’s face made the hysterical, out of control cackling get worse.

“I slept with a member of my Council.” T’Challa closed his eyes, horrified.

“We’re doomed,” he sniggered, right on the borderline between amusement and insanity.

T’Challa didn’t contradict him.

“The avatars of Bast and Hanuman cannot have slept together.” He needed to stop talking, that wasn’t making it any better.

T’Challa made a tiny, pained groan.

It set M’Baku off again, because fuck if it wasn’t comical, and he hiccupped his way to lying on the ground, hand clapped over his mouth, the step digging into his back, laughing until he was panting for air. He laughed until the urge to cry disappeared, laughed until his belly hurt, laughed until the shock has mostly gone from his system and the relief had not.

T’Challa looked down at him. “I think I’m slightly offended by how funny you find my resurrection.”

“Ah well.” M’Baku grinned. “You’ll live.”

He could see the moment T’Challa got it. His dignity cracked like ice in thaw and the king snorted, nearly falling down beside M’Baku as his shoulders shook. “I’ll _live._ That’s terrible.”

“Hey you said it, not me.” Thank Hanuman, perhaps there was something approaching normality underneath all this. “I’m just glad I don’t need to try to train Shuri up to be decent.”

“Decent, you say.”

He sat up and knocked their shoulders together. “You do okay. Now let’s never speak of last night again.”

“I think I agree with you. World must be ending.”

“Mmph. You stopped all that.” M’Baku pointed out. “Well, you and the brightly coloured idiots.” Who last he’d checked, in the chaos and death of the battlefield, had all been haring off together. He’d thought they were abandoning Wakanda, the faithless bastards, but maybe not. He choked down the remaining hysteria, found a question to start the policy of absolutely ignoring what they’d done. “How many of them are still about?”

“Far too many.” T’Challa pinched the bridge of his nose. “More than we started with, even. You are absolutely going to hate Stark. I put a small guard on them, and they technically are still my guests, but I doubt I could stop them doing anything. The Dora were decimated, and the Border Tribe’s warriors are just gone, bar those returned from dust.”

He frowned. “I know you need them, but you cannot have them back yet, they need time.”

“They… what?” Neither of them were operating on full capacity. “Is this their spirits? You are saying I should pull them back from Djalia,-“

“Hanuman, no!” Alright, perhaps that had been unclear. “No, they need time to heal.”

T’Challa jolted. “They are alive?!”

Well technically his healers hadn’t managed to report to him yet. “Last time I checked?”

“Where?”

“Jabariland, obviously. Where else was I going to put them?”

T’Challa was looking increasingly confused. “Why were you putting them anywhere?”

“You do not abandon warriors under your command, even if they are lowlander twats.”

He wasn’t sure what T’Challa was asking, but M’Baku clearly wasn’t answering it. “You were not their commander.”

“Oddly enough, after some of us dissolved, T’Challa, there was a void in leadership!” He hadn’t done badly, he was sure of that. He did not care what the precious lowlanders thought of a savage commanding their warriors, he hadn’t just been going to leave them there, directionless and in danger, after they’d all watched their brothers and sisters turn to dust.

“Do you have any of the Dora Milaja too?”

“Yes?” He replied, defensive. “Okoye was busy running off with foreigners.”

“You… where have you all _been_ , where did you take them, _why_ did you take them,” and T’Challa was edging back towards overtired word vomit, “we thought they were all dead, we thought they hadn’t come back from dust like the rest!”

“They all came back?” Hope tightened around his throat like a noose. “Mine- mine too?”

“Yes.” T’Challa said, his voice dropping to the serious and reassuring kingly tone he used sometimes. “Yes, they did. Everyone who is dust has been returned. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you didn’t know.”

“They’re okay.” He sighed and buried his face in his hands.

“They are. They have been put up in the Dora Milaje barracks and they’ve been refusing modern medical treatments and annoying my doctors, making you proud.”

“Thank Hanuman.” M’baku whispered devoutly, and touched his closed fist to his chest, a prayer of gratitude and relief. Then he remembered that T’Challa had his own lost people he was probably worried about. “I took anyone I could find on the battlefield, afterwards. There was so much confusion, no one protested.” He could damn well yell when he tried, and at that stage, anyone on the field still alive had been willing to obey, just to have someone else in charge. “We regrouped. The aliens that hadn’t dissolved either fought or fled. By the time we’d finished killing the ones that fought, one of your Dora figured out that the villages outside the forcefield were in danger.” And Jabariland. Not that they lacked defences, but he’d taken their warriors to fight in the lowlands. If the fled aliens had reached the mountains, there would have been blood spilled. “We could not let the invaders massacre those outside Birnin Zana.”

“ _Bast_. They have instructions to flee to Birnin Zana, but-“

“The aliens were between them and safety. Believe me, T’Challa, after the last couple of days I am _very_ familiar with that flaw in your planning.” His motley group of warriors had not been universally successful. They’d found the remains of several families of refugees, torn through by the fleeing invaders. “Even when they flee, these aliens flock together. We pursued, herded them into unoccupied land.” The Border Tribe warriors had been key, there. M’Baku and his people did not know the land they walked in, though they’d been terrifyingly close to the border of Jabariland by the end of it. “We pressed them into a valley in the foothills, one that ends in cliffs.” Not extremely high ones, but enough. “It took, Hanuman, at least two days to kill them all.”

“Two _days_.”

“Aye. And you wondered why I was so filthy.” Except he wasn’t supposed to talk about that.

“Thank you.” T’Challa took his hand, and M’baku tried to get it back. “No, thank you.” He squeezed it. “You rallied them. You defended our people while the rest of us were gone.”

M’Baku shrugged, uncomfortable. “If everyone else came back, what about the dusty aliens?”

“Returned as well.” T’Challa grimaced. “But so far the catharsis of hunting them down has pleased some of the Avengers.”

“I thought they were being guarded?”

“They are. The guard had to split into two groups, one to follow the maniacs around in a ship and the other to watch the sensible ones, who have been sleeping in the eastern wing.”

“Sleeping.” He huffed.

“You do not think they deserve rest?”

“Of course.” He wasn’t that judgemental. “I’m just jealous of it.”

“Agreed.” T’Challa sighed, getting to his feet anyway. And while M’Baku knew that he’d been called to the Golden City for a reason, that there was the Taifa Ngao to meet with and decisions to be made and recovery to be won, he still would rather lie there in the sunshine with a step in his back instead of doing all that.

“But the world turns ever onwards.” He reminded himself.

“Yes and because of that turning, because of time passing, we need sleep.” Above him, T’Challa raised one eyebrow. “Really, do you not know how that works? I thought Jabari had knowledge of the natural world. I may only be a technology dependant lowlander, but at least I know that.”

He barked out a laugh, and got to his feet.


End file.
